From "The Night Birds," Leon Wieseltier's column (available to subscribers only) in the August 4 issue of the New Republic:

NOT LONG AGO I surprised myself with the embarrassing thought that I no longer know any lonely people. This is an exaggeration, of course: the smart rooms in which I may sometimes be found are not lacking in people who are lonely in society. But they are in society. They are always in society. If they are lonely, they are not isolated. They move in a lively hum of articulateness and good cheer; they have learned how to give, and how to receive, a flattering assurance of urgency and importance; they fortify themselves with the shininess of their surroundings, with the insulations of achievement. Their loneliness, if that is what they are hiding, is mitigated by a universe of attractive exteriors. I am acquainted with such people and their high-end sadness. But I am cut off from the ones who are cut off, from the disconnected and the unnetworked (our technology of communications is supposed to have made such marginalizations obsolete, but I do not believe it: our culture is filling up with evidence of the lonely digital crowd), the ones who lead lives of radical solitariness, of aloneness without appeal, with no bonds to console them and no prospects to divert them, who struggle for stimulation and expression, whose beds are deserts, whose phones almost never ring, who march through their difficulties without any expectation of serendipity or transcendence. Their absence from my experience makes me feel disgracefully narrow. A few months ago I was shaken by Lee Chang-Dongs film Poetry, about an unremarkable older woman, living in modest circumstances in a lusterless city, who looks after a stroke victim, and discovers that her grandson has committed a heinous act, and learns that she has Alzheimers, and resolves to write a poem. Yun Jung-hees worn, indistinct, questing face has never left me. I look for her sometimes on the street, out of fear that she is right there before me but I do not perceive her. I always pass her by. We say of such people that they lead obscure existences, but they are not obscure to themselves. We make so many people invisible. It is a cognitive expulsion, but we are its victims. We do not expel the others, we expel ourselves. We blind ourselves and then we act as if there is nothing to see.